Merrel here:
This month we here at the studio are working to put out some new video content – new models and poses are coming soon! In the meantime, last month I tracked down fellow artist/photographer and friend Sid Ceaser to talk about some of his recent work and his appreciation for the human form.
Merrel Davis: Sid, we formally met at the Affordable Art Fair NYC in 2003. You were represented by a Gallery in New Hampshire, and your primary work was part of a series of Photographs of life-like PVC figurines. It was striking to see how life-like the bodies of these figurines, which you can buy in Japanese specialty shops, appeared in your photos.
At the time you were struggling to establish yourself, since then you’ve opened your own studio and I’ve seen your work mature. What are you working on these days?
Sid Ceaser: I’ve been doing more commercial and traditional/creative portraiture work since 2003. My “Portraits” series, which was a series of large format prints featuring portraits of anime toys, more or less came to and end in 2006 after I built up enough images to have a body of work. After spending so much time on the toys, I decided it was time to focus more on actual living subjects and finding ways to pay the rent. I’ve found that more commercial photography can help bring in revenue and help me on a wider scale by trying to get my name out locally.
MD: Your ongoing work Plastic Erotica is such a refreshing project. I love the way you use blur and diffusion to soften edges, and create such warm images of the body. It creates a level of realism that some photography with live models lack. Can you talk a little bit about your creation process, and what compelled you to depict nudity in a a non-traditional and rather unique way?
SC: My original “Portraits” series started because at the time the series started, I had a very hard time approaching people to ask them to be my subjects for photographs.
Because I was one of those bashful comic book/sci-fi/video game nerds growing up, [Merrel Note: I was too. Embrace your geeky heritage!] I turned to something that I found important to myself, which were toys. In my portraits series, I photographed these toys like they were people, and then presented them almost as large as life, if not bigger.
The Plastic Erotica series has been continuing on that same direction, but this time its me dealing with sex, the sexual ideal, and objectification of women. Growing up as I did, I was reading comics with buxom women in bathing suits saving planets, or playing video games with buxom women in bathing suits fighting for their lives, and those many years have burned a certain impression on me that I’m trying to deal with and work through. It also is about showing a tender side of the female form through use of light and texture. Its a little titillating and soft at the same time, and the ultimate goal is to show how blatant the objectification is and how absurd these toys are to even exist.
Process wise, these images are all created in my studio using controlled studio lighting. Some of these images are heavily post-processed to achieve the almost washed-out, vintage look.
MD: We here at The Great Nude are seeing a groundswell of artists moving back to more traditional and representational depictions of the nude body. How important do you feel the human form is in your work as a photographer?
SC: I do believe that the human body is the greatest machine ever. Everything is so different from person to person; skin color, texture, shape, etc. that the possibilities are forever and endless. I feel works that showcase nudes are sometimes more about the artist themselves trying to figure things out than they are about the subject. But there are just as many artists that love to simply show how light and shadows work with skin and body to create lines and shapes. That’s what makes the body such a great canvas; it is constantly changing and reacting differently to light and shadow. You can create fluid motion, or absolute stillness through the body.
You can check out Sid Ceaser’s work at:
Sid Ceaser Fine Art
Plastic Camera Studio
Sid’s Flickr PhotoStream
Subscribe to TheGreatNude.tv
